Wheel feel
My bike has been doing some crazy things for two years now, leaving me confused, writes Akshay Sawai.
My bike has been doing some crazy things for two years now, leaving me confused.
This month, I realised why. It has turned 16. My bike is in the prime of its teenage years. So what exactly did my bike do?
One day I found a magazine in its small cargo hold. It had pictures of nude female bikes. Shocked, I stashed it back in before anyone saw me. It took me a while to recover.
Whenever I parked in my building, I left my bike with its neck turned left. But the next day, it would be facing right, in the direction of a slender young moped preening nearby. This happened a few times.
My bike had started to get vain. That was another change I noticed. Somehow, it had managed to twist the rearview mirrors around and down so that it could admire its face in them.
On its fifteenth birthday, my bike demanded that I gift it a couple of denim seat covers. It said it would only wear denim. Correction. It said that I should only fund the denim. Not choose it. “You won’t know the current styles,” it told me.
My bike would scrape or clang against even a small bump on the road. I didn’t get it. One day I pulled over by the side and looked under it. Its Adam’s apple had gotten bigger.
The other day I decided it was time for a man-to-man chat about life and temptations and the need to enjoy yet not be reckless. I put my arm around the bike and said, “You are 16 now and I was thinking maybe we should talk about a few things.” It was chatting up the slender moped and was part upset, part embarrassed by my presence. “There’s no need, I know everything,” it said, blowing smoke rings through the exhaust pipe.